Malicious apps infect 25M Android devices with 'Agent Smith' malware

Re:Malicious apps infect 25M Android devices with 'Agent Smi... by scarface74 on Thursday July 11, 2019 @01:09PM (#20413293)

Sounds like an excuse for poor engineering on the part of Android. Microsoft also sells Windows to multiple OEMs and has done so for decades. OEMs also are free to add bloatware as well as the retailers (ie Best Buy adds its own bloat), but Microsoft doesn’t have this problem.

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Re:Malicious apps infect 25M Android devices with 'Agent Smi... by blablabla123 on Thursday July 11, 2019 @03:00PM (#20414391)

Yeah but Windows was created for existing hardware, in fact at first even running on an existing OS. IBM PC compatibles were a thing since the 80s on which DOS flavour from various vendor were running which in turn ran on x86.

Microsoft actually waited really long until they combined normal end user Windows with NT which was it's own OS since early 90s but also had a lot of restrictions when it came to drivers, end user Apps, Games in particular.

Google bootstrapped it all at once, that's quite an effort. That said, some phones like those of OnePlus or FairPhone have really long support times.

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Re:Malicious apps infect 25M Android devices with 'Agent Smi... by scarface74 on Thursday July 11, 2019 @03:12PM (#20414559)

The whole idea behind WinHEC early on was that Microsoft was guiding hardware manufacturers to the plug and play standard.

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Re:Malicious apps infect 25M Android devices with 'Agent Smi... by blablabla123 on Thursday July 11, 2019 @03:19PM (#20414657)

I guess in that sense Microsoft really did their homework. Apart from niche usage, good Hardware support seems everything for an OS...

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Re:Malicious apps infect 25M Android devices with 'Agent Smi... by diroussel on Thursday July 11, 2019 @01:52PM (#20413738)

It’s quite different as windows is closed source. The OEMs don’t build their own flavour of windows from source.

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Re:Malicious apps infect 25M Android devices with 'Agent Smi... by MiddleEndian on Thursday July 11, 2019 @07:54PM (#20416967)

Seems like the open source-ness of Android is of little use. It helps manufacturers rather than users.

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Re:Malicious apps infect 25M Android devices with 'Agent Smi... by scarface74 on Thursday July 11, 2019 @01:58PM (#20413776)

And almost everything that makes Android what it is outside of China is also closed source - Google Play Services and the drivers.

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Re:Malicious apps infect 25M Android devices with 'Agent Smi... by rightbyte on Thursday July 11, 2019 @01:39PM (#20413598)

Ye. Patching system libs should be just pulling those as long as they are backwards compatible. Maybe some key parts that the OEMs fiddle with are not behind abstractions properly.

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Re:Malicious apps infect 25M Android devices with 'Agent Smi... by jamespo on Thursday July 11, 2019 @01:12PM (#20413321)

probably cost you more money than you'd make writing malware for windows phones

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Re:Malicious apps infect 25M Android devices with 'Agent Smi... by ry4nolson on Thursday July 11, 2019 @03:03PM (#20414441)

no one is talking about windows phones. they're talking about windows.

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